ICOMLIDO is an XML harvesting schema developed to enable museums, galleries, and other cultural heritage institutions to share descriptive metadata about their collection objects in a standardized way. As the primary exchange format endorsed by ICOM-CIDOC for object-level metadata delivery, LIDO occupies a central position in the museum documentation landscape, bridging the gap between heterogeneous collection management systems and the aggregation platforms that make cultural heritage discoverable online.
Background
LIDO emerged from the convergence of two earlier museum documentation initiatives: CDWA Lite (developed by the J. Paul Getty Trust) and museumdat (developed by the German museum community). Both schemas addressed the need for a lightweight harvesting format that could deliver descriptive metadata about museum objects to portals and aggregators. In 2008, the CIDOC LIDO Working Group began merging these two approaches into a single international standard. Version 1.0 was published in 2010, and version 1.1 followed in November 2021 with refinements based on a decade of implementation experience.
The development of LIDO was driven by a practical reality: museums and cultural heritage organizations need to participate in multiple portals and aggregation services, each potentially requiring different metadata formats. Without a common harvesting schema, each participation requires a custom metadata mapping, which is both time-consuming and costly. LIDO addresses this by providing a single, well-defined format that any provider can map to once and then supply to many consumers.
Purpose and Scope
LIDO is designed specifically for delivering descriptive metadata about cultural heritage objects for resource discovery. It covers the full range of museum object types, including works of art, architecture, cultural history artifacts, technology and science objects, and natural history specimens.
The schema is organized around an event-based model, reflecting the CIDOC-CRM approach to documenting the lifecycle of cultural objects. Rather than treating descriptive information as flat fields, LIDO structures metadata around events such as creation, modification, acquisition, and exhibition. This event-centric design allows LIDO to capture rich contextual information about objects while remaining interoperable across institutions.
Key capabilities include support for multilingual descriptions through per-element language attributes, accommodation of multiple classification and subject schemes, and the ability to express complex relationships between objects, actors, places, and events.
Key Elements
LIDO is organized into several major wrapper elements rather than a flat list of properties:
| Wrapper | Purpose |
|---|---|
lidoRecID |
Unique identifier for the LIDO record |
descriptiveMetadata |
Container for all descriptive information |
objectClassificationWrap |
Object type and classification |
objectIdentificationWrap |
Title, inscriptions, repository, physical description |
eventWrap |
Events in the object's lifecycle (creation, discovery, etc.) |
objectRelationWrap |
Subject matter and related objects |
administrativeMetadata |
Rights, record metadata, resource information |
rightsWorkWrap |
Rights pertaining to the object itself |
recordWrap |
Metadata about the metadata record |
resourceWrap |
Digital representations and related resources |
Serializations and Technical Formats
LIDO is defined as an XML Schema (XSD). The normative schema file is hosted at lido-schema.org. All LIDO data is exchanged as XML documents conforming to this schema. There is no official RDF, JSON, or other serialization, though some implementations have produced RDF mappings aligned with CIDOC-CRM.
Governance and Maintenance
LIDO is maintained by the LIDO Working Group, which operates under ICOM-CIDOC (the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums). The working group includes representatives from major museum aggregation projects and national documentation initiatives worldwide. Changes to the schema follow a consensus-based process within the working group, with public review periods for significant revisions.
Notable Implementations
LIDO has been widely adopted as the preferred harvesting format for museum data aggregation. Europeana, the European digital platform for cultural heritage, accepts LIDO as one of its primary ingestion formats. The German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek) uses LIDO as its standard format for museum object metadata. Many national and regional aggregation initiatives across Europe and beyond have adopted LIDO for cross-institutional data sharing. The Smithsonian Institution and numerous other major museums have implemented LIDO export capabilities in their collection management systems.
Related Standards
LIDO is conceptually grounded in the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM), sharing its event-based approach to documenting cultural objects. It was created by merging CDWA Lite and museumdat, both of which it supersedes for harvesting purposes. LIDO data is frequently aggregated into the Europeana Data Model (EDM) for cross-domain discovery. For detailed cataloging beyond harvesting, institutions typically use standards like SPECTRUM or CDWA in their collection management systems, with LIDO serving as the export and interchange layer.